If you are creating your site using an open source solution like WordPress, Joomla, Pligg, or Drupal then you’ll need to make sure that you keep it safe from hackers. Hackers like to solve password puzzles and gain access to places they aren’t welcome. If you use a simple password that is easy to guess then you make yourself vulnerable to hackers and other malicious people.

So how do you make your passwords harder to guess? Here are a few tips:

• Make them long - Short passwords are easy to guess. Make your passwords longer.
• Don’t use dictionary words - Some robots will go through the dictionary and create a list of potential passwords from real words. They can be programmed to enter passwords while their human users sleep. If you use a simple dictionary word as a password then you could be opening yourself up to a hacking attempt.
• Use numbers and special symbols - In addition to being long, you should add numbers and special characters to your passwords. Some companies require their employees to use two numbers and two special characters in their passwords to gain access to the company intranet and other secure areas. You might institute a similar policy at your company.
• Use lower case and upper case letters - Another way to add security to your passwords is to use lower case and upper case lettering. Using only lower case letters makes you more vulnerable. Again, some companies make this a requirement for their employees.
• Don’t just use the obvious characters - The characters above the numbers on your keyboard are obvious choices. What are not obvious are other special characters like the < and > symbols and the copyright symbol.

The longer your password and the more different types of characters you use in your password, the more secure your password. Here are a few examples of bad passwords and how you can make them better.

• Bad = peter / Better = P3e*e”R9t1
• Bad = 123456789 / Better = 1a2$3B45u6:;7C89*
• Bad = meandyou1 / Better = m6e&Y1o0^u=U7s5

You want your password to be easy for you to remember but difficult to guess for a hacker or robot. If you keep that principle in mind then you’ll do well. Stay away from using important dates and names like your birthdate, anniversary, children’s baptism dates, and names of firstborns.

Have you ever heard of .yu domain names? If not, then you won’t be disappointed that they’ll stop working after September 30. If you have one then you might be alarmed. What should you do?

The following advice is really for anyone, regardless of whether you have .yu domain or not, who is planning a transfer of domains to a new domain. If you have a .yu domain then you’ll need to start making your transfer as soon as possible. I would not recommend waiting until September. You want your new site working before your old site stops working and if you are planning 301 redirects, forget about it. They won’t work either. The entire .yu block of domains will be dead and so will any links that are pointing to them.

So how do you transfer an old domain to a new domain? Here’s a short list of items that you should keep in mind in your preparations.

1. Do a little keyword research first - in other words, update your keyword list to see if your old list is still the best list for your niche - and secure a domain name that is adequate on another TLD; be sure to choose a TLD that is sound and doesn’t have a history of volatility.
2. Transfer a handful of pages from your old site to your new site and test them before you move entire site. Do they work and are they visible in all browsers? Is the internal link navigation between them intact?
3. If all is good, transfer all of the pages from your old domain to your new domain.
4. Check all of your backlinks to your old domain. Are there any that you can control yourself? If so then get those links changed to point to your new domain. Contact the site owners of all other links and request that they change the link to point to your new pages. Make sure that you give those site owners the exact address of the old page being linked to and the exact page URL of the page you want them to link to on your new site. Be prepared for some site owners not complying with your request, which means you’ll lose some of your links, but if you can get most of them changed then you’re off to a rocking start.
5. If you have not already done so, change all of your directory listings. For some directories you may need to delete your old listing and submit a new one. Whatever it takes, make sure those directories are listing your new site and not your old one.
6. Create and submit a sitemap for your new site to all of the search engines that crawl them.
7. Test your new site again for crawlability, navigation, and user friendliness.
8. If you are satisfied wit your new site, take your old site down so that your new site can get crawled and indexed with no duplicate content issues. If your site is not a .yu domain and you have reason to believe that it will stay where it is for a long time, use a page-to-page 301 redirect on every page of your website so that you don’t lose any visitors. Your links to the old site should count for PR and link juice to the new site. But in the case of .yu domains, that won’t happen so taking your site down is a better option.
9. Continue marketing your new site.

If you do have a .yu domain name, now is the time to start your transfer. The bigger your site the more likely you are to run into problems and the larger those problems are likely to be. You’ll need to plan for contingencies so sooner is better than later.

If you’ve never used Google Analytics then you’re missing out. It’s free and that’s a good selling point, but it’s also one of the best metrics tools on the planet. It’s certainly better than anything else out there in the free (or even paid) category of tracking products. And if you’ve been to the Google Analytics site but decided it wasn’t for you because you couldn’t find any of the helpful information, that has changed. They’ve changed the way they look.

Obviously, the new face is meant to make Google Analytics easier to work with for new users. If you are a veteran user then you likely sign up through your Personalized Google account. If not then you may see the face. It’s still helpful.

If you have a website and you want to know how users are using your website then I highly recommend Google Analytics. You simply add a little code to the pages of your site and verify it then you can track how users are using the site, including the number of visitors, unique visitors, time on site, time on individual pages, bounce rates, navigation patterns, traffic sources, and you can even create your own customized reports. It’s the perfect metrics tool to measure your search engine optimization efforts as well as paid search. Try it out.

If you run a local business, things just got better for you. Google has announced that it will now start providing Google Analytics data for businesses that are listed in its Local Business Center.

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The specific data you’ll be able to track includes:

• Number of impressions your LBC profile receives via Google.com search or Maps search
• The number of actions people take to interact with your business listing
• Top search queries used to find your listing
• Zip codes where driving directions came from

The value of this information extends far beyond mere search. The zip code information, for instance, could be used to help you add business locations. If you see a lot of queries coming from a specific zip code and you know that residents in that zip code have a long way to travel to get to your office, you could open up a satellite office in that zip code or a new business location.

Just like with Google Analytics and any website you own, knowing the top search queries to find you is smart for future optimization reasons. So, in a word, this information is valuable to you and now you have access to this information through your Local Business Center listing. Take full advantage of it.

New website owners seldom think about the importance of their server in regards to search engine optimization. This is perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of building a website and it can get you into deep trouble if you don’t consider the options soon enough.

You have may have heard warnings about linking to bad neighborhoods. All that really means is that the server you are on is critical in terms of who you may be (often unknowingly) associated with.

Most new website owners, and many veteran site owners, go with the cheapest hosting plans they can find. This could be hurting you. Those cheap hosting plans are often shared hosting plans, which means that you share the server with several other websites. Do you know what those websites are? Chances are, no. And your web host likely isn’t going to tell you. So what can you do?

One thing you can do is go for a more expensive hosting plan and host your site on a dedicated IP. That will ensure that you don’t end up on a server with bad sites or spammy neighbors. You should also consider your site’s security. If it is easily hacked then you might become that “bad neighbor”. The horror stories are growing, but there are plenty of websites that have been hacked and used as a haven for spam, ruining their own chances of becoming a good neighbor themselves.

Finally, ensure that you examine the sites carefully that you do link to. One of the things that often gets website owners into trouble is just linking to a site that they think is cool without really examining where that site links to and what they offer. Has that site been hacked? Does it lead to bad neighborhoods?

Even if you do all of the above, you could still end up on a server with a site that is bad. And it could hurt your reputation with the search engines even if you aren’t linking to the other site. If there are several bad sites on your server then your site could get lumped in with those other sites. If a search engine bans an IP block or penalizes a complete block of IPs then your site could be affected. If you see a sudden drop in PageRank and you know that you’ve done nothing wrong, that could be the case. Move your site to another host or ask for a dedicated IP and see if that fixes your problem.

This post is beyond the scope of search engine optimization, but it should be helpful. The Google Analytics Blog has a great post showing you how to set up goals for your site using Google Analytics. I highly recommend you read that post. But why would you want to do that?

Well, establishing goals is always a good thing in business, but it’s even better if you can measure how successful you are in reaching them. Google Analytics allows you to do that with ease. By setting up goals you can tell at a glance where you are having abandonment issues, if you are having abandonment issues, or where customers are bailing on the purchase process. With Google Analytics Goals, you measure each step of your sales process funnel and Analytics will tell you how many people make it through that part of the conversion process.

By being able to measure your goals and know when you are losing prospective buyers, you can address any issues that need address. You have actionable data. And that’s why Goal measurement is one of the most important things for any business.

Some time in 2007, Ask.com added sitemap support to its search functions. That simply means that if you have a sitemap for your website then Ask.com can and will crawl it. That is not a guarantee that your website will be indexed. But its no guarantee that your site will be indexed at Google, Yahoo!, or MSN either. So that’s nothing new.

Having a sitemap does mean that your site will get crawled. The protocol was established by agreement between the three leading search engines so Ask.com was late to the game. Better late than never.

According to Ask.com’s Help Files, there are two ways to submit your sitemap. You can include a line in your robots.txt document or ping it. Here’s the line of text for your robots.txt:

SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

To ping your sitemap submission to Ask.com, use this ping URL:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

If you have a set of folders that you want to spin off into a separate domain name, that is possible using mod rewrite rules. Let me be clear that the following instructions are for Apache servers. The protocol will be different for Linux and Windows servers. But let’s say you have a blog that you want to spin off into its own domain name.

For instance, your blog currently sits at http://mydomainname.com/blog, but you want to move it to http://myblog.com. How do you move your blog to the new domain name without breaking your links?

Create an .htaccess file out of a blank Notepad document and add this one line of code to it:

RedirectMatch 301 blog/(.*) http://myblog.com/$1

Broken down, the command involves your existing folder at the old domain followed by a forward slash and .* enclosed in parentheses. The asterisk in parentheses tells the user’s browser to include any folder with the preceding antecedent in the command. So any permalink in the blog folder of your domain name will be redirected. Put the .htaccess file in the folder in question (ie blog) and your redirect will be complete.

It’s always best, when you are redirecting a series of pages, to just include the paramaters for the parent page or folder and include all its subservient pages. It’s a lot less work.

If you are a developer and you need access to multiple Google Analytics accounts from different users, you can get access to that information for your search engine optimization clients if you can build your own application using the Google Analytics API. Several developers have already done this.

The Google Analytics Developer’s Guide can walk you through the steps and give you all the information you need to develope your own code for use with Google Analytics. In fact, if you check the lab, someone else may have already developed code that you can use for your purposes.

As you can see by visiting the above link, the Google Analytics API and documentation code supports a variety of languages, including .NET, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Go ahead. Start using the Google Analytics API. I’d like to see what you come up with.

If you publish AdSense on your website then you’ll be happy to know that you can now analyze your traffic and revenue through Google Analytics. Through Analytics you’ll be able to see what your top AdSense content is, top referrers for AdSense clicks, and AdSense trending. You can see the peak times of day for when you are earning revenue from clicks and even if there are better days of the week.

So how do you use this information for better website and on site search engine optimization? Take a look at your AdSense statistics. If you know what your top content is, your top referrers, and your best trending times then you can create more pages to appeal to the audience that is making you the most money. Powerful stuff for publishers.

This video should give you more insight into how Google AdSense and Google Analytics can work together to make you more money:

If you are serious about keeping your blog or website up to date with the latest search engine optimization and ranking protocols then at some point you may be faced with the decision to change your permalink structures just as John Furst recently did. There is more than one way to do this. The most obvious way is with a 301 redirect. Another way to do it is through your .htaccess file by using the Mod Rewrite to change the rules of your permalink structure.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. With 301 redirects, if you have a lot of inbound links to your website you’ll get to keep those. That’s important to understand. Because if you simply change the rewrite rules for your permalinks in your .htaccess then you’ll lose those links. Site visitors will be redirected to the correct permalink for sure, but you want to keep any link juice you’ve earned intact along the way.

While changing your mod rewrite rules in .htaccess is a quick and permanent way to redirect old URLs to new URLs that are more search engine friendly, please consider the long range link building implications that could create. You’ll have to start over with your link building and if you have blog posts that have been good link bait, keep in mind that you will lose those links. You may want to use the 301 redirect instead.

Matt Cutts is changing his domain name. The interesting thing is he is changing several things at once and using a 302 redirect, which is temporary. Ordinarily, this isn’t the way you’d do it. Matt says so himself:

Note: changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.

Also, if you were truly moving a site, a 302 redirect wouldn’t be the right redirect to use–a 301 (permanent) redirect would be better.

Which brings up the question, How should you do it?

If you were truly moving your site from one domain name to another, I’d recommend that you start with the move to a new domain itself. That way, if something goes wrong with that then you can just delete the redirect you’ve placed on your old site and go back to the way it was. Very easy to do. If I were doing this move, I’d do it in the following order:

• Buy a domain name and redirect the old site to the new one
• Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress
• Change to a new theme
• Change hosts and IP address

Alternatively, you could move the first step to last and do all of your onsite changing first before you move. But you certainly don’t want to do it all at the same time.

Also, you definitely want a 301 redirect if you are planning your move on a permanent basis, but using a 302 redirect is a good way to test your new home. If it doesn’t work out then you can just replace your new .htaccess file with the old one and go back to your old domain name. That’s certainly a lot easier to do.

How would you perform a move to a new domain name like this?

Almost one month ago Google Analytics announced that hourly tracking was possible. This is a huge move, especially for TV advertisers.

Let’s say that you have a new TV ad campaign starting next week. You target your advertising to three separate geographical areas, but you decide to run the same TV commercial in all areas and at different times of the day. Hourly tracking allows you to see which ad is most effective. If you see any traffic spikes directly after your ad runs in any of those three markets then you can know whether those TV ads are working or not.

I think it would be nice to have this tool for tracking radio ads and normal web traffic as well. There may be times when I want to see if a particular website gets more traffic in the morning or in the evening, whether I’m advertising that site on TV or not.

Still, for TV advertisers this is a great tool to work with because TV ads are known to run at specific times and you can see when they run. Therefore, you can tell if the ad is effective or not judging by spikes in your website traffic. That’s a real historic move for advertising and could lead to some real innovation in integrated marketing strategies.

In the early days of the Internet a website allowing Internet users an opportunity to check out websites to see if they were trustworthy got its start and carved out a niche for itself. That website was Alexa.

Over time, Alexa improved its offerings and quickly become the site to go to in order to determine site trustworthiness. Alexa was truly the first website of any note that could be relied upon for objective information. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best available. Then, savvy webmasters stopped relying on it. But recent upgrades may make Alexa relevant again. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Andy Beal said the same thing this morning.

I like a lot of the new stats that Alexa is tracking. Specifically, here are some new stats that Alexa is offering that it didn’t track before:

• Yesterday’s stats for traffic rank, reach, and pageviews
• 7 day average stats for traffic rank, reach, and pageviews
• Hot URLs (pages that are hot right now)
• Traffic rank by country
• Ranking by niche category and very deep subcategories

Alexa, it appears, is trying to make itself relevant again. I’m anxious to see what happens with this service in the near future. Will Alexa receive a surge in toolbar uses unlike anything seen before?

When is the last time you check your server logs? By taking a look at your server logs from time to time you can uncover what search terms people are using to find your website through your on site search engine optimization efforts. Then you can and search for those same search terms at each of the search engines and see what you see. Why do you do this? To see what the top three search results are.

The top three search results for any search query usually do a good job of answering the question the searcher has in mind when making that query. Visit those pages and see how they answer the question. Then go to your page for that search query and add content to it that answers the site visitor’s question. Make sure you put that content near the top of the page so that it can be easily found by the search engines and by your human visitors.

You might even add some keywords or h-level tags to your page to help them out in the search rankings. It might even behoove you to add some graphics with alt tags and some title attributes to your links. Whatever you need to do to help your pages rank better will increase your traffic counts and your chances of converting that traffic to dollars. Check your server logs for opportunities.